What Do Product Managers Do?
“Product manager” isn’t is the dream job of every grad student these days? Even though its a dream job for every MBA student the product manager role is still not clear in peoples head. If you ask “ what does a product manager do?” The most precise answer you can get is that product managers are responsible for coming up with the idea of best products to ship and help their teams to create these products. This is a fair answer which you can find from every product management book, but in this article, I will try to explain the responsibilities of a product manager very briefly so that you can have a clear idea about the role in your head and I will also talk about skills required to be a good product manager.
Product Manager Job Description
As a product manager, you wear many different hats in your organization. You might do tasks that no one wants to do. Product managers can fill the gaps in the organization and responsible for identifying the weaknesses of the rest of the team and strengthen the weak parts.
The primary purpose of every product manager is to find out the best products ideas and monitor every phase of the product development to make sure that the product is launched successfully. This sounds like a straightforward and pretty easy task to achieve but its actually very daunting.
Product managers are like the CEO of a product and being a CEO requires some hard skills in the next section I will talk about some of the critical skills you should master to become a hard knock product manager.
Before we start to talk about the product manager skills read the section below carefully.
If there is one thing you should remember about the role of the product manager, it should be this;
The role of the product manager is to build a team with the best operating system because your team is your best product
Product Manager Skills
Product managers need to master a few core skills to become a good product manager. Although it’s hard to master every single one of these skills, it’s not impossible if you put the hard work.
Strategic Thinking
As a product manager, you should be good at identifying what is a good product to build and what is not. You will hear many ideas from your team members, investors, and customers. You should take all these ideas and evaluate them to understand whether they will be good for the company in the short and long term. Once you figure out which ideas you should pursue, you should start to think about how to make those ideas come to life. You need to consider things like “how much resources do we have?”, “can our engineer team handle the task?”, “is the idea viable?” etc.
Before you decide to go and build your product you need to decide whether your product is a “need” or “want”?.In either case, you have to make sure that what you are trying to build is not a product only 10 out of 100000 people wants. Good product managers are very good at identifying what customers want.
Leadership
Product managers interact with various departments inside the organization. As a product manager, you need to ask other teams to do some tasks for you, and this requires excellent communication and practical intelligence skills. When you ask your team to work for your product you need to demonstrate strong leadership skills so that your team believes in you.
As a product manager, you will be communicating with various teams such as marketing, sales, engineering, design an even with the executives. Apart from the internal communications, you will also be interacting with the customers as well. You will constantly be communicating with external and internal people and it’s important to keep everyone at the same pace while working toward the same goal.
Technical Knowledge
As a product manager, you need to have sufficient technical knowledge to understand your team to make sure that you are all on the same page. Having technical proficiency will allow you to understand the industries you are working on. For example, if you are working in a marketplace space, you need to have an understanding of payment systems to make smarter decisions.
Today many product managers take data-driven decisions. Efficiently using product management tools such Rakam combined with technical thinking can be a big help to every product manager.
If you have the technical knowledge, you can communicate with your engineering team more effectively. Understanding their language will allow you to gain their respect and make you a better leader for your engineering and design teams.
Great Writing Skills
Communication is a crucial skill for a product manager, and most of your communication will be written. It is essential to be an excellent writer to deliver your message clearly to a people you are working with.
You can improve your writing skills by asking feedback for your emails and project descriptions. Another helpful thing to do is to write blog posts regularly, you can practice on your blog, or you can try to do guest posts in other blogs or local newspapers.
Product Management Books
Product management is a very hands-on job, but it’s still helpful to read books written by industry veterans. There are complex concepts in the product management cycles, but some of these books are great at explaining the complex ideas in simpler words.
Also, you will read about the real-life case studies, and you will get to see things from a different angle which will help you to learn from the mistakes of others.
Here is the list of books you should read
Book #1: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
Book #2: Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love
Book #3: High Output Management
